R60 fee to check if your driver’s licence is being suspended in South Africa

South African motorists will need to pay R60 every time they want to check how many demerit points have accumulated on their driver’s licence cards.

This comes as the government prepares to launch a new demerit-point system under the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (AARTO) Act.

This system will see motorists receive points on their licences for various driving infringements. Once they have incurred 15 or more points, their licence will be suspended.

Individuals who wish to check the status of their licence and how many points they currently have will need to pay an R60 fee for their query.

This was criticised by Driving.co.za managing director Rob Handfield-Jones, who argued that querying demerit points has virtually no cost for the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA).

“It is almost a certainty that companies, for governance reasons, will insist on staff who drive on company business regularly declaring their number of demerit points,” he said.

“The only way to prove this will be via an enquiry. Based on four enquiries a year, this amount adds up to 5% of a driver’s monthly salary on minimum wage.”

The minimum wage in South Africa is R30.20 per hour, meaning a single query is valued at two hours of labour, reported MyBroadband.

Handfield-Jones argued this was a completely unnecessary cost that disproportionately impacts low-income households.

“The fact is that the cost of the query to the RTIA is essentially zero. It is a single line of database code which returns a few tens of bytes of information,” he said.

“To charge at all for this, let alone R60, as set down in Schedule 2, is unconscionable. It should be a free service, to encourage South Africans to always be apprised of their points status.”

South Africa’s new traffic laws are incomprehensible – literally

He also raised other concerns about the new AARTO system, highlighting changes between the draft version and the final regulations, which were done without public consultation.

“Massive evolutions in both wording and content have been published as final regulations and which, in many cases, barely resemble the draft upon which they were based,” he said.

“These changes have been made without any opportunity for the public to comment on them. A wave of new text has appeared, including concepts never before seen in previous drafts.”

Handfield-Jones criticised the poor quality of the new traffic regulations published by the Department of Transport, which were made using a scan of a paper document.

He said the copy rendered sections of the document completely illegible, making it vulnerable to legal challenges on the grounds that it was not possible to determine with certainty what the text said.

“Why is the department so keen to make it as difficult as possible to evaluate the final regulations and compare them with the draft version?” he asked.

“In addition, the majority of Schedule 3 is illegible, and I mean this literally; I cannot make out with certainty what is written there, so poor is the scan quality.”